Articles by Matthew Roe

A Maryland-based film critic and award-winning filmmaker, founder of Heaven’s Fire Films. Has written film critique and theory for FilmSnobbery, Community Soul, The Baltimore Examiner, AXS, Men's Confidence Magazine, Screen Anarchy, and IonCinema. He writes the film theory column "Anarchic Cinema" for Film Inquiry, DVD/Blu-ray reviews for Under the Radar, and movie reviews for Film Threat.

It’s a rare piece of cinema that is able to hearken back to atrocities committed during World War II through spoken recollections in the midst of a home invasion plot, but that’s exactly what we’ve been given with Winter Hunt (“Winterjagd”). Astrid Schult has crafted a unique, aging Nazi thriller, brimming with unending desires to…

Two ex-convicts working at a dead-end diner are given an opportunity to change things around when a lawyer proposes a heist, unaware that larger antagonistic machinations are hard at work. While this plotline is fairly standard as far as heist capers are concerned, Hadi Hajaig has cranked the tonal voltage up to eleven by infusing…

“Artificial Intelligence: Monster or Shangri-La?” Though the official tagline of Do You Trust This Computer? may prelude to a neutral stance on the evolution of AI, the resulting film is far more a cautionary prophecy than a wide-eyed musing about possibilities awaiting the human race. Chris Paine (“Who Killed the Electric Car?”) returns to the…

An older major league baseball player becoming a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II to foil an atomic bomb plot has enough palpable atmosphere to be a compelling and pulpy noir. What is even more intriguing, is that it actually occurred. Based off the 1994 biography written by Nicholas…

The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish nationals carried out by the Soviet secret police in April and May of 1940. Though the Soviet Union claimed that Nazi Germany had orchestrated the slaughter in 1941, it officially acknowledged responsibility for the killings in 1990, after decades of state-sponsored cover-ups. Piotr Szkopiak…

“Gantz” is a 37-volume manga series written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku from 2000-2013, whose worldwide distribution has sold an excess of over 20 million copies. Hallmarked by its sexual overtones and sadistically gory aesthetic in tandem with deep sociological, psychological and anthropological themes dissecting morality, it is considered one of the most controversial seinen…

The Godzilla franchise has seen its shares of ups and downs since its inception in Ishirô Honda’s 1954 effects opus “Gojira,” boasting a filmography spanning 30 features and two major Hollywood adaptations, with another four currently in development (two of which are Hollywood backed). Interestingly, none were animated. Now, along with anime juggernaut Gen Urobuchi…